Walsworth Blog

Christoph Sisson

Christoph is a marketing and customer-experience practitioner who is committed to understanding customer needs and business objectives. As marketing manager for Walsworth, Christoph enjoys informing customers about solutions that can improve their success.

Recent Posts

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. This is the mantra of those who want to avoid waste and repurpose useful material to extend its value. This mantra doesn’t just apply to plastic bottles – magazine publishers should apply this concept to their content.

Reusing or recycling content into books gives extra life to excellent material. These books can extend the life of the content, engage current subscribers and attract new readers.

“You can please some of the people some of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.”

This quote’s earliest attribution dates back to 14th-century monk John Lydgate. In today’s world, the question for publishers is: how do you please the greatest percentage of your readership most of the time?

“Duct tape,” said Sandra Giarde, CAE, executive director of the California Landscape Contractors Association (CLCA), when asked about the secret of her organization’s successful member retention program.

All kidding aside, CLCA must be doing something right, given their 87% retention rate. How do they do it?

In their book, “When Millennials Take Over: Preparing for the Ridiculously Optimistic Future of Business,” authors Jamie Notter and Maddie Grant enlighten their readers with four hallmarks of office cultures that are well-positioned to attract and retain millennial employees.

Increasingly, the authors found that these four hallmarks can also apply to millennials as association members — or prospective members. As part of our Making it Easier series for associations, we’ll home in on two of the four hallmarks that are most important for attracting and retaining millennial members to boost association membership, and to provide you with practical tips that help you engage this generation that has been the source of concern and confusion for many associations.

When it comes to retention, you know member engagement is the name of the game. Industry research proves — unequivocally — that engaged members are more likely to renew. Several AMS database companies include engagement scoring modules in their software, but configuring those modules (determining which actions to score, how many points to assign to each action, and where to draw the line for highly engaged versus less active members) can be overwhelming.

But scoring, measuring and leveraging member engagement doesn't have to be difficult. As part of our Making it Easier series for associations, read this Q&A describing how Tom Morrison, CEO of the Metal Treating Institute, is making it easy to move the needle on member engagement: